Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Pale Blue Dot...and Ultrarunning

I'm a sucker for Dr. Carl Sagan, and agree with Phil Plait, the motive force behind the wonderful blog, Bad Astronomy, that Sagan's words are inspirational and powerful:

It is a wonderful thing that words written many years ago can inspire people today. When Carl Sagan wrote his essay “Reflections on a Mote of Dust” (commonly called “Pale Blue Dot”), he must have known how special it was. His words were inspired by a picture taken from a spacecraft 6 billion kilometers away, a probe commanded to turn around and look at our solar system from this great distance. It was so terribly remote at the time that our entire planet appears as a simple pale blue dot, a single pixel of color in a vast patch of darkness.

His essay is, in my opinion, one of the finest examples of writing in the English language.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at
it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever
heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young
couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and
explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species,
lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers
of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in
triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of
the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on
scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How
frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how
fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the
delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged
by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from
elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that
astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my
mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The link to Ultrarunning, of course, is that all of our efforts and miles and pain and joy really don't amount to much on the cosmic stage. That's a humbling thought.

But on the other hand, when we do our Ultra thing, when we kindly and compassionately embrace a spirit of mutual effort on the trails to further our understanding of ourselves, we really are honoring the words of Dr. Sagan:

"To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."